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Published: Wednesday, 18 December 2024 at 09:30 AM
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols: how the beloved Christmas service began in a lowly Cornish barn
Read on to discover all about the origins of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols…
When and where did the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols take place?
Anyone even half-interested in the origins of the world-famous King’s College Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is aware that the format was borrowed, for Christmas 1918 and thereafter, from a Truro Cathedral original. That ground-breaking occasion in Cornwall took place at 10pm on Christmas Eve 1880, the shape of the ‘Nine Lessons with Carols’ having been masterminded by Truro’s bishop-cum-dean, Edward Benson. ‘Appropriate lessons from the Scriptures were read in the intervals [between carols]’ was the understated way in which a local newspaper heralded the birth of a Christmas institution.
What may nonetheless surprise many is that King’s was remarkably tardy in taking its cue from Truro, for all that the college’s dean, Eric Milner-White, imaginatively refashioned the Cornish template. Parish churches, especially, had long been inspired by the Truro precedent. For example, at Christmas 1897, Holy Trinity Church in Maidstone staged ‘the festival service, consisting of nine lessons with carols, according to the use of Truro Cathedral’. In December 1909, St George’s Cunningham Park, Harrow, put on the ‘festal service of the nine lessons and carols’. And so on.
The first Festival… in a lowly Cornish barn-like structure
The Nine Lessons with Carols enjoyed no grand debut on that midwinter Truro evening in 1880. The venue was a £448 wooden structure, barn-like, holding no more than around 400 people. This was Truro’s new ‘pro-cathedral’, a temporary place of worship being used while the neo-Gothic cathedral we see today was being built. After a gap of more than 800 years, Cornwall was once more blessed with a bishopric. However, the historic parish church of St Mary wasn’t deemed adequate to serve as the cathedral of the new diocese of Truro, formally constituted in December 1876, with Edward Benson as its first bishop from the following year. St Mary’s was duly all but demolished by the end of 1880 – save for the south aisle, which would be incorporated into the new building and named ‘St Mary’s Aisle’.
A grainy, blurred 1880 newspaper photo of the bare interior of the ‘Temporary Wooden Church of St Mary’ conveys the impression of a large, rough-and-ready barn/village hall with a simple pitched roof, the space poorly illuminated by natural light. Once the new Truro Cathedral was habitable, the stop-gap structure had been moved to nearby Redruth in the 1890s, purchased by a footwear company which promptly changed its trading name to the Cathedral Boot Works. The building later served as the showroom and store for a brush-making business, before it burnt down in 1981.
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols… music director Somerset Walpole
In its brief reign as a cathedral, the old St Mary’s church in Truro hosted Christmas Eve singing of carols in 1878 and ’79. This was hardly an original notion – carol services happened everywhere – but an innovation here. Previously the cathedral choir had simply sung door-to-door around Truro. At both the 1878 and ’79 occasions the choir was conducted by one GHS Walpole, an individual who deserves no little credit for the birth of the Nine Lessons with Carols – someone who was probably considerably more musical than Benson.
Somerset Walpole arrived in Truro in 1877 in his early 20s, ready to be ordained by the bishop. Once received into holy orders, Walpole was appointed the cathedral’s ‘vicar-choral’, with overall responsibility for the choir and music. WJ Margetson’s 1930 memoir of Benson relates that ‘Walpole felt something was needed on Christmas Eve, both as a counter attraction to the public houses and as a right prelude to Christmas. He suggested to Bishop Benson the holding of a Carol Service, and the bishop drew up the present service, compiled largely from medieval service books.’ Margetson seems to elide the initial 1878 carol service and the 1880 Nine Lessons with Carols, but Walpole’s pivotal role is clear enough.
Walpole had a passion for music and music-making. On his arrival in Truro, he was soon banging heads together to bring about the formation of a Truro Philharmonic Society, which he helped run. He was a decent enough tenor to be able to tackle solos in, for example, the society’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang. Walpole gave lectures to Truro audiences on Haydn and Beethoven, organised a local music festival and conducted a performance of John Farmer’s brand-new oratorio Christ and His Soldiers in the doomed St Mary’s.
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols… Bishop Edward Benson
So, in 1878 Walpole put the idea of a carol service to Edward Benson, whose liturgical magic was duly sprinkled on the 1880 event. The bishop was an energetic, innovatory perfectionist. Born in Birmingham, he transcended a humble family background to demonstrate academic brilliance at Cambridge and then make his mark as headmaster of Wellington College. ‘As a former public school headmaster, he rather expected deference at Truro,’ says Canon David Miller, an authority on Benson’s episcopate in Cornwall. ‘Maybe some found him dictatorial. However, he was a born leader, with great organisational talents and an ability to relate to people of all classes and churchmanship.’ As soon as 1883, Benson’s qualities would see him translated to Archbishop of Canterbury.
The bishop’s son, AC Benson (famously the writer of the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ text to Elgar’s music), wrote of how his father ‘arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve – nine carols and nine tiny lessons’. What exactly the ‘ancient’ or ‘medieval’ sources were is unclear, although Stephen Cleobury, the late director of music at King’s College Cambridge, suggested the inspiration might have been ‘the monastic office of Matins with its three groups of three lessons each followed by a responsory’.
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols… Methodist inspirations
Maybe this was the case, but there very likely was another fascinating factor in the shaping of the service. As the bishop presiding over a predominantly rural county, Benson would have endorsed the Victorian Anglican church’s concern for the needs of country areas suffering impoverishment as urbanisation advanced inexorably. ‘Benson was also conscious that Methodism had deep roots in rural Cornwall,’ observes David Miller. ‘So, it seems he borrowed the time-honoured “hymn sandwich” from Methodist church services for the structure of his Nine Lessons with Carols, consciously reaching out to the community around him. A hymn sandwich would run something like hymn-introduction-hymn-prayer-hymn-reading-hymn-sermon-hymn, and so on. You can see that it’s a model.’
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols… the creation of a brand
The impetus for Benson to create something distinctive in 1880 may have been his desire to help the grieving congregation of St Mary’s move on from the lightning-quick demolition of their historic church that autumn. What then set apart his version of the common-or-garden carol service?
The first thing to say is that framing things as ‘Nine Lessons with Carols’ was a smart piece of packaging. At a stroke, a brand was created which caught the imagination. Inside the packaging was Benson’s forensically assembled sequence of intertwined words and music, setting the Nativity firmly in the context of Biblical prophecy and God’s redemptive purposes for mankind. The nine lessons (five from the Old Testament, four from the New) were read by nine members of the Truro cathedral community, a pattern that was essentially adopted at King’s in Cambridge, although Dean Milner-White opted for a greater emphasis on conveying the Nativity narrative than Benson.
Was the appropriately knowledgeable Somerset Walpole consulted over the selection of music? More than likely. After all, at that 1880 Christmas Eve ‘festal service’ he conducted the cathedral choir, which was very much centre stage. It delivered three choruses from Messiah, four carols (including The Lord at first had Adam made and Good Christian men, rejoice) and a magnificat. The congregation was allowed only to join in the choruses of two carols and the singing of the hymns O come, all ye faithful and Bethlehem, of noblest cities.
The first Festival and its surroundings
We can imagine the scents and sounds in the air on this celebrated Truro occasion. There was surely the aroma of the wood from which the building had just been constructed. A local newspaper reported that the smell of the paint used for the interior decoration ‘makes the atmosphere rather unpleasant’. Did the midwinter cold in this Cornish ‘barn’ evoke thoughts of a Bethlehem stable?
As to the look of the wooden cathedral, the same newspaper report informs us that various items of furniture including benches and the pulpit (which survives) had been transferred across from ‘the old church’; likewise the ‘canonical stalls’ and Bishop’s throne, both placed in a designated chancel ‘within the altar rails’. In a corner was the old St Mary’s organ. Built around 1750, it had just undergone renovation by local firm Brewer & Co but was apparently still feeling its age. Certainly at the console for the Christmas Eve service was the St Mary’s organist, William Mitchell, soon to be superseded by the first official Truro Cathedral organist, teenager George Robertson Sinclair.
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols today
Just a few of the sounds from the organ heard on that historic 1880 occasion can still be enjoyed today. The instrument now sits in the cathedral’s St Mary’s Aisle. ‘Not much of the original 1750 organ survives,’ explains the present Truro Cathedral director of music, James Anderson-Besant, ‘but the core of the instrument remains, and there are definitely stops and therefore sounds which can take us right back to that occasion in 1880.’
Anderson-Besant is looking forward to finding innovative ways of marking the 150th anniversary of the famous Christmas Eve service, in 2030. One gratifying element will be the inclusion of Truro Cathedral’s celebrated girl choristers. ‘Our boy and girl choristers sing at separate Nine Lessons and Carols services each year, with separate repertoire, but they’re connected in both celebrating the living tradition of what happened here in 1880.’